Happy Birthday!

It was a no brainer! I chose this mug from a nice shop in Biggar to be amongst my Christmas presents. I knew one day I would use this as a blip. I was amazed when I heard on the news this morning that today is the 150th Birthday of the Periodic Table of Elements.

Having come through school with an interest in science this was an important set of little boxes. I took a job as a lab technician when I first moved to Penrith and one of my early tasks was to create a wall chart for each of the labs of this table. I used to try and recite it!

Anyhow, 150 years ago,  the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev published the first periodic table in 1869, to illustrate periodic trends of the then-known elements. He also predicted some properties of unidentified elements that he expected would fill gaps in the table. Clever man.


A lot of my working life elements 47 and 79 were important to me. now I'm just happy that we have a compound of 1 and 8 to boil up for a cup of tea, and enough of 8 to breathe and keep us alive.. 


If only we could be sure we are using the Earth's resources carefully and wisely.